The dinner was a failure. While it was still unfinished the company began to1 break up and slip out, one after another; and presently none was left but the stranger at my side and me. We were sipping black coffee and smoking. The stranger said, with a sigh—
“Ah, well, that is the way with them. They are mad—that captain and that mate.”
“Mad?”
“Well, on the way to it. I have noticed it for days.”
“I think, myself, that they are disturbed about something, but I don't see any suggestion of madness about it.”
“But you haven't been around. You have been shut up a good deal lately and haven't seen what has been going on. Let me tell you a few things.” He was speaking in a low voice. A rattling of dishes attracted his attention—a steward was clearing the other end of the table. “Come to my cabin—this place lacks privacy. Bring your coffee.”
It was a roomy and comfortable cabin, and had a good lamp in it, also a locker and a swinging table. He locked the door and we sat down. He began to speak again—still in a guarded voice, a precaution not needed, now, and so I judged that it was habit or nature that made him do this.
“These new people have got a name for me which you may not [begin page 561] have heard; they call me the Mad Passenger. I do not mind this insult, I give you my word. It is a secret bitterness to me, true, but as it hasn't its source in malice, but only in ignorance it is of course not blameworthy. O dear, think of the irony of it—they call me mad—they! Do you know what these people are doing? They've got a chart of Dreamland, and they are navigating this ship by it!”
I tried to look incredulous. He laid his hand on my arm and said with great earnestness—
“You don't believe me. It was not to be expected that you would. But I have said only the truth. I have seen the chart myself; and I have peeped in through the chart-room window when no one was near, and seen them working over it and trying to compass-out a course over it. It is perfectly true. Along at first, any one could go and look; but not now. They don't allow any but themselves to enter that place; and they've curtained the window. You see now, don't you, why they flew out so at the purser and the girl?”
“Well—er—”
“Dear me, it's an amazing thing, when you come to think of it. It's a chart of one particular part of Dreamland—Jupiter. No, not Jupiter—Saturn. No, I'm wrong again. I can't call the name to mind, now, but I know many of the details, land and sea; in fact am tolerably familar with them, for I have often been there in dreams, with the Superintendent. It may be that you have been there, too, and will remember whether it is a planet or a fixed star, if I mention a detail or two. On the chart are countries called England, America, and so on, and an ocean called Atlantic. Come—does it suggest anything? Can you help?”
It troubled me. It was a confusing situation. I said—
“Yes, I have been there. It is called the World, and—”
“That's it, that's it! It had slipped my memory for the moment—”
“But dear sir, are you sure it is a part of Dreamland?”
He looked frightened; and edged away from me a little, and sat apparently dazed and ill at ease. I didn't know anything to say, so there was an uncomfortable silence. Presently he said, haltingly and timidly—
[begin page 562]“You—you won't be offended—but—but are you mad, too? They all are.”
I said to myself, “It is of no use to struggle. Something has happened to me, I don't know what. It seems manifest, from all sorts of evidences, that I have been under a delusion since I don't know when. Years, no doubt. I think I have lived in dreams so long that now that I have at last got back among realities I have lost the sense of them and they seem dreams, too.” I wished I knew of some good way to get back this man's confidence; no doubt he could wake up my dead memory for me and bring to life in it things of interest to me and thus save me from surprising Alice with my ignorances at every turn. Presently I ventured this—
“No, I am not mad, but a thing has happened to me which is nearly as serious. I can trust you, I think, and I will. Will you let me tell you something in strict confidence—something which I have confessed to no one, not even my wife?”
It pleased him to the marrow—I could see it.
“It is good of you to show me this distinction; but you have always been good to me, these twenty-two years—I say it gratefully. Whatever the secret is, I promise to keep it faithfully.”
“I believe you will. It is this. I have lost my memory.”
“Lost—your—memory?”
“Lost it wholly.”
“Why—it is terrible. Was it from the fall?”
“Fall? Have I had a fall?”
“Yes. Ten or eleven days ago.”
“I remember nothing of it.”
“Yes, you slipped and fell on the deck,—there was a heavy sea at the time. I was with you. I helped you up, and you laughed and said you were not hurt but your clothes were wet and you would go and change them. I haven't seen you since to speak with you till today; but George always said you were well, when I inquired, but chose to keep to your quarters most of the time.”
“It must have been the fall. I remember everything that has happened today, but not a single previous experience of my whole life.”
“Dear me, it is a fearful thing, an amazing thing.”
[begin page 563]“And a misery beyond imagination. My wife knows that something has happened to me, but she does not suspect the serious extent of it. Of course I wouldn't have her know, for anything. She terrifies me by reminding me of things which I ought to be familiar with, then I have to scramble out of the scrape the best I can; and of course I do it awkwardly. But I am safe now. When I want to get over one of those obstacles I shall come to you. You will post me?”
“Gladly. Nothing has happened to you in twenty-two years that I am not acquainted with. We shall have no trouble.”
“This makes me easy. You will tell me my history. It ought to interest me, for every detail of it will be new. And you must tell me about yourself, too. She spoke of you to-day, and I supposed I was hearing of you for the first time.”
“Isn't it astonishing!”
We had a long talk together and he told me a great deal of my history, and I found it curious and entertaining; and he told me a great deal about Alice, whom he had known ever since she was three years old. He posted me in the details of the devouring of Captain Hall's boy by the spider-squid, and in other matters which I needed to know in order not to be embarrassed when trading reminiscences with my family and the servants.
We became comrades, and I came to like him better and better every day. I spent an hour or two in his cabin daily, and he an hour or so in my quarters. Alice had always liked him very well; and now he was become very near to her, for outside of our family he was the only relic left of her former life and its lost and lamented comradeships. He had a name of a jaw-breaking sort, but no one called him by it in these recent days; even the family and our servants had dropped it for the one used by the rest of the ship. This was “M.P.,” (mad passenger.) It was simple and easy. He was sane, I thought, but as long as the ship thought differently, the title was well enough, and did no harm.
After a couple of weeks I noticed that when I wanted him and couldn't find him in his cabin there was no occasion to go groping everywhere—he was pretty sure to be in one certain place. On the [begin page 564] forecastle—sitting on the mizzen-hatch. Sitting there and peering wistfully out ahead through the gloom, and looking melancholy. At last, one day in his cabin I asked him why he did that. A pathetic expression came into his face, and he muttered an ejaculation or two in his own strange language, then said in English—
“I am looking for my country.”
“Your country?”
“I have done it every day for twenty-two years. It is long to wait, long to wait!”
The poor devil. It was sort of heart-breaking to hear him.
“What country is it? Where is it?”
He told me the tough name of it—it was an Empire of some sort —then added—
“It isn't anywhere in particular—it floats.”
“Floats?—isn't fixed, isn't anchored?”
He smiled, and said—
“Why should it be? It isn't Dreamland. Of course it floats.”
“Tell me about it. It must be dreadful there. In the eternal night.”
“No, it isn't. It is a fair land, and beautiful. And it is not night there, but eternal day—a mellow rich light, and enchanting; for it circles forever and ever around outside the Great White Glare, and just the right distance away from it—like the other wandering Empires. Tradition says one vaguely glimpses one or another of them now and then at intervals of a century or two.
“It is curious. What keeps your Empire just the right distance away?”
“Attraction and repulsion. But for the attraction it would drift into the darkness; but for the repulsion it would drift into the Glare —and then!”
“I wish I could see that country. Do you expect to see it again?”
A passion of longing lighted his face for a moment, then faded out and he said despondently—
“No, it is too good to hope for. At first I hoped—all the first years. But that is all gone by, now—oh, yes, that is all over, years and years ago; I watch for it now from old habit, not from hope.” [begin page 565] He was silent awhile, then sighed and added, “But it is better so, perhaps. My girl-wife has broken her heart with waiting, no doubt; my little child is a woman, now—she would not remember me. She was half as old as your little Bessie—yes, and like her a little, and had the same cunning ways; and sometimes there flashes into Bessie's face an expression when we are playing together that is exact! When I see that, I have to put the child down and go away; I cannot endure the joy of it—and the pain. But let us talk of other things. Say something—anything! Ask me a question.”
“I will. Of course I have forgotten about your coming aboard the ship; how did it happen?”
“Curse that day—forever! I had a great yacht, and I used to take my family and friends with me and make cruises out into the cold weather and the darkness; and once we walked the deck a good while laughing and chatting; then a storm began to brew and the snow to fly, and they all went below to arrange for some games and prepare something hot and wait a quarter of an hour for me. We were shortening sail, and I wanted to superintend a little. I was standing astern, backed up against the taffrail and staring up toward the flapping kites—which I could not see for the gloom—when your ship's invisible bowsprit swept past me, and the dragging bight of the main-brace caught me around the body and carried me off my feet. I seized it and saved myself; the bowsprit dipped me into the sea, but when it rose again I was astride it, and my yacht had vanished in the blackness and the storm.”
“You never saw it again?”
“No, never. And now I was among strangers; we did not know each other's language, of course, and I could not explain how I got there; but they were friendly to me and hospitable. They taught me the language; they taught me how to divide time, and measure it off into seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, and a hundred other strange and interesting things; and so, as I was always something of a scholar, these twenty-two years have not been dull and stupid to me. But I would they could have had less of heart-break in them!”
It was a pathetic history, and I was touched by it. I was moved to try to say some hopeful things to the poor exile, but he courteously [begin page 566] put all that aside, and said he found it wholesomest to keep the subject out of his mind when he had the opportunity to do it—and that was only when he had a chance to talk. Talk could deal with other matters, and was a good medicine. So then we drifted into a discussion of language, its curiosities and peculiarities, and it presently came out that in his tongue there were no exact equivalents for our words modesty, immodesty, decency, indecency, right, wrong, sin. He said that in most details the civilization of his country was the counterpart of that which prevailed among the highest civilizations of dreamlands like the World, and that a citizen of that unreal planet would be quite at home in his Empire, and would find it quite up to date in matters of art, erudition, invention, architecture, etc.
That seemed strange, but he said there was properly nothing strange about it, since dreamlands were nothing but imitations of real countries created out of the dreamer's own imagination and experience, with some help, perhaps, from the Superintendent of Dreams. At least that was his belief, he said, and he thought it reasonable and plausible. He had noticed that in Jupiter, Uranus, and in fact in all other dream-countries he found things about as they were at home, and apparently quite real and natural as long as the dream lasted. In the World, it was true, there were a few details that it had a monopoly of, but they were not important, and not pleasant.
“For instance?”
“Well, for instance they have what they term Religions; also curious systems of government, and an interesting but most odd code of morals. But don't you know about these things? Haven't you been there with the Superintendent? Come in!”
It was the children. They had come with Germania to be entertained.
M. P. was good at that. He told them a quaint and charming tale whose scene was laid in his lost country, then he and I had a game of romps with them. In the course of the romps Bessie hurt herself, and in her anger she tried to break things, and did break a glass. I said—
“Tut-tut, why did you do that, Bessie?—it's wrong.”
[begin page 567]“No-no, not wrong,” said M. P.; “don't call it that.”
“What then?”
“Inexpedient.”
I remembered. It was the nearest that his native tongue could come to furnishing an equivalent for our word “wrong.”
He petted Bessie into a good humor, then set the children to rummaging the drawers of his bureau and the compartments of his locker. In one of these latter they found a microscope. M. P. began to arrange it for an exhibition, and a curious feeling came over me. It seemed to me that I had seen the same thing done before; even that I had done it myself—in a dream. It was a strange sensation, and troubled me. Then M. P. put a drop of water on a glass slide, threw a circle of white light under it from the reflector, screwed the lens down tight against it, and soon the children were exclaiming over the hideous animals they saw darting about and fighting in the bit of moisture.
I dropped into a whirl of thinkings and dim and shadowy half-reminiscences, and wholly lost myself. After a while the children reached up and kissed me good-bye—I was hardly conscious of it—and then they went away with the nurse and with M. P., who said the sea was rising and he would help them home and then come back. I presently got up to stretch my legs, and noticed a portfolio lying in the open locker. Pictures, I judged, for M. P. was a good amateur artist—there were several small portraits and photographs of his wife and children pinned to the wall which were his own work, he had told me. I opened the portfolio and found a number of pictures; pictures of himself, his family, and many lady and gentleman friends: in some cases beautifully clothed, but in most cases naked!
I heard him coming. I put the book away, and prepared myself to look like a person who had not discovered a disgraceful secret and who was not shocked. I arranged a pleasant smile and—